1. Technical Field
Generally, the invention relates to cloud computing. More particularly, the invention relates to a method and system for creating a composite public cloud.
2. Description of Related Technology
Recently, a model for delivering hosted services over the Internet as emerged that has come to be known as “cloud computing”. The term “cloud computing” flows naturally from the cloud symbol that is often used to represent the Internet or other network in various diagrams. The hosted services fall into a handful of categories, for example: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
Cloud computing has several characteristics that distinguish it from traditional hosting. It is available on demand, often by the minute or the hour, for example. A user can have as much or as little of a service as they need or want at a time. Additionally, the service is managed by the provider. Cloud computing owes its development to advances in virtualization and distributed computing, coupled with continually increasing opportunities for high-speed Internet access.
In general, there exist public and private clouds, with the public clouds making computational resources available to all corners. In contrast, a private cloud is usually privately-owned and run and serves a limited population of users, for example the employees of a large corporation that owns the compute infrastructure. Additionally, virtual private clouds can be created from public cloud resources.
Infrastructure as a service is a way of taking individual physical servers and virtualizing them in such a way that one may have, for example, a thousand physical servers, upon which virtualization software may be overlaid. The virtualization application can, in its turn, present those thousand physical servers as, for example, 10,000 virtual servers. Within these virtual servers one can then run his or her corresponding enterprise applications. Thus, virtualizing previously physical resources is known as infrastructure service.